Versioning

[Rob Seaman]

On Jul 2, 2009, at 12:48 PM, Paul Harrison wrote:

> During the discussion that took place on this before the latest  
> Standards document the consensus was that for a document name of the  
> form
>
> WD-VOSpace-2.0-yyyymmdd
>
> * That the 2.0 was the version number of the "protocol/standard"
> * yyyymmdd was effectively the version number of the document
>
> What was not explicitly thought about is the progression from a  
> version 1.0 to a version 2.0 of a protocol, - in this case the  
> document numbering can only start and stay with 2.0 from first WD to  
> REC - even though there might be substantial (protocol/interface)  
> changes between the drafts

This distinction between version of the standard and version of the  
document maps well onto the process used with VOEvent.  I have about  
50 sequential (and some parallel) versions of the document that  
eventually turned into v1.0 of the standard.  The first few versions  
were named in a rather ad hoc manner until it became clear that one  
has to say just these two things with the nomenclature from the very  
first draft:

	- What standard am I working on?

	- What version of the document is this?

Otherwise you find yourself inadvertently incrementing the version of  
the standard, when what you are really doing is just revising a draft  
description of the same final product.  It would be silly to require  
the version of the standard to be incremented with every notion  
thrashed out by a working group while reaching consensus.

Which is to say that assigning a version number to a new standard is  
something that occurs at the beginning of the development/revision  
process, not just as a final swat on its tush.

Incrementing by integers has the main advantage of making progress in  
the IVOA appear to be occurring ten times as rapidly.  (It's also more- 
or-less the industry norm.)

Rob